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<!DOCTYPE html>
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        <title> Ici THK — Cyberfeminism </title>
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        <header>
            <h1> <a href="index.html">Ici THK</a> </h1>
            <h2> Deborah Lupton </h2>
            <h3> Sociology </h3>
        </header>
        <main>
            <article>
                <section id="author">
                    <h4>About the Author</h4>
                    <p>Deborah Lupton worked already in 1993 on the analogy
                       between the communication of technology threats and of
                       diseases, she presents us the analogy that is voluntary
                       made between the computer and the body in a hygienic
                       society where we tend to rely on centralized organisation
                       to desinfect and sanitize our world. Since then the issue
                       of scale and control.</p>
                </section>
                <section id="sources">
                    <h4>Sources</h4>
                    <p><a href="assets/BookChapt_TacticalBiopolitics_subRosa.pdf">
                        <em>Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology</em></a>,
                        Cultural Studies, 8:3, pp.556—568 ISSN 0950-2386</p> (Subrosa; 1999)
                </section>
                <section id="scare">
                    <h4> Panic computing: The viral metaphor and computer technology </h4>

                    <p>The unproblematic use of the term 'virus' applied to
		       technological artefacts, inspire ponderings on the wider
		       implications of the viral metaphor. The choice of
		       phraseology in textual accounts and talk, the discursive
		       devices used, recurrent lexical patterns in describing
		       things, events, groups or people is revealing of the
		       latent ideological layer of meaning of such
		       communications (van Dijk, 1990; Fowler, 1991). In
		       particular, the intertextuality, or the ways in which
		       texts selectively draw upon other texts, other cultural
		       forms and discourses to create meaning, indicates the
		       political and ideological functions of texts and delimits
		       the boundaries within which topics may be discussed
		       (Fairclough, 1992; Astroff and Nyberg, 1992). *The
		       nomination of a type of computer technology malfunction
		       as a 'virus'* is a highly significant and symbolic
		       linguistic choice of metaphor, used to make certain
		       connections between otherwise unassociated subjects and
		       objects, to give meaning to unfamiliar events, to render
		       abstract feelings and intangible processes concrete. In
		       doing so, the metaphor shapes perception, identity and
		       experience, going beyond the original association by
		       evoking a host of multiple meanings (Clatts and Mutchler,
		       1989: 106-7). As Geertz has argued, '[i]n metaphor one
		       has.., a stratification of meaning, in which an
		       incongruity of sense on one level produces an influx of
		        significance on another' (1973: 210).</p>
                </section>
		<section id="viruses-and-the-computer-corpus">
                    <h4>Viruses and the Computer Corpus</h4>

		    <p>The present analysis examines in detail the
		       stratification of meaning evident in the widespread and
		       largely unquestioned adoption of the viral metaphor to
		       describe computer technology malfunction in popular
		       texts. It is argued that the viral metaphor used in the
		       context of computer technology draws upon a constellation
		       of discourses concerning body boundaries, erotic
		       pleasure, morality, invasion, disease and destruction. In
		       what follows, the meanings of the term 'virus' in the
		       medical context, the symbiotic relationship between body
		       and computer metaphorical systems, the symbolic danger of
		       viruses, the seductiveness of the human/computer,
		       Self/Other relationship and the cultural crisis around
		       issues of bodies, technologies and sexualities at the fin
		       de millénnium are discussed to illuminate the ambivalent
		       relationship of humans with computer technology in late
	               capitalist societies.</p>
                </section>							
		<section id="morality-and-viral-politics">
                    <h4>Morality and viral politics</h4>

		    <p>There are no "good" Germs or 'normal Germs; all Germs are
		       bad' (Helman, 1978: 118-19). To counter this attack, as
		       Cindy Patton points out, bodies are visualized as being
		       'filled with tiny defending armies whose mission [is] to
		       return the "self" to the precarious balance of health'
		       (Patton, 1990: 60). The immune system is commonly
		       described in popular and medical texts as mounting a
		       'defence' or 'siege' against 'murderous' viruses or
		       bacteria which are 'fought', 'attacked' or 'killed' by
		       white blood cells, drugs or surgical procedures (Martin,
		       1990; Montgomery, 1991). This military discourse,
		       redolent with images of physical aggression, has become
		       routine and standardized to the point where its
		       metaphorical origins are erased: it is now a 'dead'
		        metaphor (Montgomery, 1991: 350).</p>
                </section>						
		<section id="the-seduction-and-terror-of-cyberspace">
                    <h4>The seduction and terror of cyberspace</h4>
                    <p>The viral metaphor has been adopted in computing
		       terminology to express the meanings of rapid spread and
		       invisible invasion of an entity that is able to reproduce
		       itself and causes malfunctioning on the systemic
		       level. It is telling that this alternative use has been
		       so readily accepted that at least one Australian medical
		       journal has featured articles on computer viruses devoted
		       to making explicit the similarities between biological
		       viruses and computer viruses (Dawes, 1992a, 1992b). Just
		       as the immune system is described in terms of military
		       imagery, popular accounts of computer viruses commonly
		       employ the terminology of war to conceptualize the
		       struggle between technological order and chaos.  [....]
		       Ways of describing computer technology have both created
		       new terminology which has entered the language and have
		       drawn upon elements of older, more established lexical
		       systems. In particular, drawing upon the centuries-old
		       body/machine discourse, there has developed a symbiotic
		       metaphorical relationship between computers and humans,
		       in which computers have been anthropomorphized while
		       humans have been portrayed as 'organic computers'
		       (Berman, 1989: 7).The immune system is also commonly
		       described as an information-processing system,
		       communicating by means of hormones. By this imagery,
		       there occurs 'the transformation of the human subject
		       into an object, a repository, or else a collision site,
		       for various types of detectable and useable information'
		       (Montgomery, 1991: 383). Indeed, according to Haraway,
		       bodies have conceptually become cyborgs
		       (cyberneticorganisms), that is, 'techno-organic, humanoid
		       hybrids' (Haraway, 1990:21), or compounds of machine and
		       body theorized in terms of communications, for which
		       disease may be conceptualized as 'a subspecies of
		       information malfunction or communications pathology'
		        (Haraway, 1989: 15).</p>
                </section>
		<section id="the-viral-metaphor-and-technophobia">
                    <h4>The viral metaphor and technophobia</h4>
		    <p>At the fin de millénnium, the body is a site of toxicity,
		       contamination and catastrophe, subject to and needful of
		       a high degree of surveillance and control. Kroker and
		       Kroker (1988:10 ff.)  term the contemporary obsession
		       with clean bodily fluids as 'Body McCarthyism', an
		       hysterical new temperance movement.  [...]  'Panic
		       Computing' invokes '[t]he underlying moral imperative
		       ... You can't trust your best friend's software any more
		       than you can trust his or her bodily fluids - safe
		       software or no software at all!' (Ross, 1991: 108). The
		       insertion of an 'infected' disk, that is a 'carrier' of
		       corruption, spells disaster for the integrity of the
		       computer corpus. Just as people are exhorted to grill
		       their sexual partners for details of their past intimate
		       lives, so as to be 'sure and safe' before proceeding to
		       exchange bodily fluids, so they are warned to verify the
		       source and safety of the computer disks they insert into
		        their PCs (Sontag, 1989: 167).</p>
                </section>
            </article>
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